Hot on the heels of the critical and financial success of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo dove into his sequel to Hellboy. In truth, the film might have been called Guillermo del Toro’s Greatest Hits, as Guillermo reexamined and revisited virtually every one of his major character, story, design, and thematic elements, from Cronos on. Audiences and critics responded with widespread (if not universal) enthusiasm. Hellboy II is an undeniably delightful ride, a wild rush of moments and details burnished to a high sheen by a writer-director drawing on everything he loves and delivering it to his audience with creative relish.
Guillermo says, “I think that Hellboy II is a sister movie to Pan’s Labyrinth in many, many ways, texturally, spiritually.” This occurred as much out of practical necessity as artistic choice, for Guillermo was working on both projects simultaneously. On both, he says, it was “me jamming ideas. Mind you, I’m writing Hellboy II as I’m writing Pan’s Labyrinth. As always, I was multitasking: (a) in order to meet deadlines and (b) because Pan’s Labyrinth had no deadline. I was not making a living on Pan’s Labyrinth, so Hellboy II was sort of sustaining me through Pan’s Labyrinth. The way you’re paid on a script is commencement, delivery of first draft, revisions, and production money. So I essentially lived on the commencement money for a year and a half or more, and I needed to deliver in order to pay quickly mounting debts.”
Immediately upon finishing Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo leapt into preproduction on Hellboy II. Although he and his family were living in a suburb of Los Angeles at the time, he found himself shooting everywhere from Spain with Pan’s Labyrinth to Budapest for Hellboy II, and then moving to New Zealand for two years to work on The Hobbit, which he was originally slated to direct. As Guillermo said at the time, “I live like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I fold in a suitcase and I go.”
One thing Hellboy II exudes is confidence, for by now Guillermo felt assured in his instincts and choices, his interests and predilections. As with the first Hellboy, Guillermo brought Hellboy creator Mike Mignola aboard to work on designs and story ideas. Mignola found it a very different experience from the first time around. “The second film was much more a del Toro picture, so a lot of my influence, it’s there but it’s buried under layers of other people’s stuff,” Mignola revealed to Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “The Hellboy character in that second picture is so far away from my version of hellboy. . . . In fact, there was a moment in one of the meetings where I said, ‘well, Hellboy wouldn't do that.’ And del Toro said, ‘Your Hellboy wouldn’t. Mine would.’”
Despite such boldness, Guillermo had concerns about the logistics for Hellboy II. “It was not a gigantic-budget movie,” he notes. “Hellboy II was eighty-five million bucks. But we tried to make it luxurious and luscious.”
He also had to make it fresh—a daunting challenge, since every fantasy film of the decade, from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, was exploring similar terrain. But Guillermo was not intimidated. He searched far and wide for unusual designs that could bring a new inflection to the Celtic-dominated visual language of contemporary fantasy. “We did a very careful study,” he explains. “If you look at Balinese architecture, and then you look at really Nordic, Slavic architecture, if you migrate, you find shapes that echo one another, like curved ceilings, curved rooftops with pointy edges. With Hellboy II, what was fascinating was that, when you start twisting the Celtic knot, and you toy with it, it becomes a Chinese symbol. And if you tweak it a little more, it becomes a Hindu symbol. It is extremely easy to manipulate. There is a very fluid, universal language in the Celtic design that is fascinating, and you can find it in Slavic design. So we tried to explore it and move it away from any sort of rigidity.”
Guillermo adds that in Hellboy II, “I wanted to have a quality that is sensual,” especially in the case of the giant elemental forest god Hellboy kills. “It has the moss on the chest, a lot of leaf foliage, but then, if the tentacle moves, you see the substrata. It feels like a juicy vegetable, translucent. It was like celery. And we went to great lengths. I think that everything needs to be painterly and sensual, and you need to be aware of the texture. For example, in the corridors of the BPRD [Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense], even then the concrete surface needs to really feel like concrete.”
In the notebook, Guillermo developed a variety of the striking images found in the film, adding layers and lushness to visions that echo his earlier works. The cracked blue-white marble skin of the vampiric Jesús Gris in Cronos (where, Guillermo admits, “the makeup was not good enough”) morphed into the cracked porcelain head of the ghost-child Santi in Devil’s Backbone and the tombstone-white face of the overlord Damaskinos in Blade II, until finally becoming the delicate, pale visages of Prince Nuada and his sister, Nuala, in Hellboy II. “It was not marble by then,” Guillermo points out. “It was ivory.” Hellboy II’s eyeless Angel of Death, eyes scattered across its wings like stars in the night, recalls not only the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth, but Guillermo’s work on Mephisto’s Bridge and tropes from his beloved symbolist painters, too.
Troll Market street musician concept by Wayne Barlowe.
Johann’s helmet, Liz’s cross, the bestial Mr. Wink, Cathedral Head, the vast gears that fill the elfin throne room, the Golden Army—golems opening like gigantic Cronos devices—are all lovingly rendered in these pages. Most detailed of all is the bustling Troll Market, full of wonders at every turn.
Initially, Guillermo envisioned a trilogy of Hellboy films, but now he thinks a third Hellboy movie won’t happen. If Hellboy II: The Golden Army is Guillermo’s swan song to the franchise, he feels well satisfied. No film is ever perfect, or could ever fully transmit every notion or realize every detail, but with Hellboy II Guillermo is unconcerned, he says, “because I like it so much. I’m in love with what we got. I cannot be objective. I don’t want everybody to agree. I’m just declaring that, for me, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve done.”
With Prince Nuada [Luke Goss] and Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), del Toro wanted to create a race of elves with pale, porcelain-like skin, an idea he explored in the notebooks (OPPOSITE), and which resonates with figures from his other films.
GDT: This [opposite] is a test of the Prince Nuada makeup. Curiously enough, this is me drawing it over an actor. That is Charlie Day, who was one of the two guys I had in mind for the part; the other was Luke Goss. But I tried it on Charlie, and it looked to me like it was too extreme and made the prince too hard. Blood makes the prince exquisite and kind of delicate in a good way.
MSZ: Again, the continuity of ideas from movie to movie is interesting. You start, with The Devil’s Backbone, to use porcelain skin that cracks, and then you go do this. How did that play into your ideas about how to push elves and fantasy away from the Celtic tradition?
GDT: Well, I think elves should be kick-ass. I love Michael Moorcock’s Elric, and I think elves are really savage warriors. I love the idea of an elf being white, completely white, almost ivory-like. And being creatures of such perfection that they almost shouldn’t be flesh-like.
I’m very proud of Nuada and Nuala, his sister. They’re very beautiful creations, and the idea that when elves die, they turn to stone? I love that idea because I thought then entire fields—battlefields—of elves are now stones, fallen stones. And when they go to Bethmora and the Giant’s Causeway, they see a lot of stones, and I’m just thinking, “Those are fallen elves that fell defending the city.”
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 28B
ARABIC!!
Signs indicating the names of the zones in the Troll Market, made of bronze or a similar material and posted on the columns in the tunnel.
–Lights made by sources in the floor and wall
–Why is A.S. so driven to speak with the princess so fast?
–A story that reunites the best moments of M.R., one by one.
–Perhaps the prince’s chamber could be in the TROLL MKT, which would be why the organ grinder’s monkey finds it so easily.
–Sufism is infinite and therefore it’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s inside us but eludes us. It doesn’t exist but it’s always present. It consumes us each day, as if we were petty nourishment for its fires, which are our own.
–Everything that happens strengthens us. Pain, loss (which is nothing but exchange),and death which is but another transformation of our energy.
–C.C. of the rest of the film
• Map Shop in Gold/Greens
• Army Base 1955. Earth tones, military green, and blue and yellow Christmas lights.
• Flashback in shades of Scarlet and gold that don’t regain their intensity until the end of the film.
– Nuada Silverlance
–The magic world’s color code.
– • The T.M. GREENS BLUES GOLD RUST RED.
• Throne Room: GOLD and BLACK
• Bethmora: Ochre/ Gray/Amber
• G.A.C. Golds/Scarlets
• Little hallway Ipepe: Greens/Gold.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 24A
11/8/06 13 Goyas and I’ll throw out the A. Shave. I hope everything turns out well.
11/24/06 War, murder, people killing people they don’t know, those are facts. The barrier between us, that one we can’t break, you and I, that is tragedy. Pure and simple.
–If I move the prologue so that it contains the legend of G.Q., it will make the TROLL MARKET section lighter.
–It’s important for the “Elemental” sequence to feature a large-scale scene and show us “NATURE VS. M”
–They show the king the Elemental grenade and call it “the Bad”
–Placing our faith in organized religion makes beggars of us, starving people pleading for something that they carry, and have always carried, within
—You disgusting–meat sacks of GARBAGE.
HB [?] set.
—THE WORLD—etc.—“Keep up the good work”
The prince does his “cleansing,” little by little the graphics mix together with the graffiti.
Royal markings
–Angel of Death.
plays with lives.
–What is evil if not the work of the virtuous man?
–Perhaps it would be a good idea if Abe “read” the state of Liz’s pregnancy.
–“the immoral and impious straight line” Hunderwasser.
–Solitude and silence are the greatest gifts or the worst punishments.
–“Fairy cottage” or “Storybook architecture popular during the 20’s/30’s
Del Toro’s original idea for the Angel of Death was given a lair by Mike Mignola.
MSZ: Here we have the Angel of Death, which is such an important figure in Hellboy II, but which can also be traced back to some of your ideas for earlier, unmade projects.
GDT: Yeah, the first time I designed the wings of the Angel of Death was for a project called Mephisto’s Bridge, but they were much more elaborate. Every feather had an eye, and each of the eyes in the feathers represented a soul. But the Angel is really rooted in medieval illustrations, which show angels with four wings and eyes in the wings. I just love that image, and I keep it in my head.
And I wanted him to be blind in the sense that he doesn’t care if you choose one path or the other. That gives him a distance. There’s something really, really sinister about the angel that is blind to human suffering, if you will. And we took a long time sculpting the faceplate because I wanted it to feel like a helmet, like a crown, but to give it the texture of real bone. And then we added the asymmetry of the crack—in a character that is all about symmetry, you put in an asymmetrical detail.
MSZ: The faceplate in the final design isn’t something I see reflected in the early drawings.
GDT: No, it literally came out when we were sculpting. I went to visit the makeup effects department, and when we started there was no faceplate. So I took a bunch of Plasticine and I started expanding it into a faceplate. And then Norman Cabrera found the half-moon shape. And we started saying, “Let’s make it bigger,” and it just happened. Sometimes I like “sketching” with clay. I used to sculpt, and am an okay sculptor, so I can get away with it, although not all of the makeup guys like it when I do it.
MSZ: And then the Angel’s teeth remind me of the Pale Man’s.
GDT: That’s exactly right. I like really narrow, small teeth that are long. I think they are very threatening. If the only makeup you use on an actor is just changing the teeth, it’s already super creepy. And it’s very subtle. People don’t read it at first.
The angel’s faceplate, absent in the original design, was developed during the sculpting process.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 24B
–A thing like that, if nature didn’t put it there, then it had a purpose. Somebody did. Somebody wanted it there. there are things in these woods that are older, and meaner than us. They have been here before any of us and hate us.
–The land, the soil of our land calls our name, the rocks and the roots dream of us, await our return. Call our name. Call us back. (True name). The earth of our land dream of us.
–Mirror Helmet for J. TO AVOID REFLECTION/SET. Plus TORSO J to establish it at the start of the film
–That’s a long sword, your highness, overcompenseting?
Arno [?]
4:35 28/11/06
–The prince needs to show his sister ONE room just like things were in their splendor.
“The worst”
–A character called Mr. Knuckles–
–A 1,000 people could save the earth.
–We are a race of shitbags protecting their turf and this young, [?] of shits. How about that??
–December 15, 2006, Stephen King writes in E.W.“. . . the best Fantasy Film since THE WIZARD OF OZ . . . you will SEE This movie . . .” I am happy. They nominated us for the Golden Globes.
–Lynch: It’s about the idea.
–Emilio: It’s about the story.
–Lynch: I’m a classic avant-gardist.
–The community moves slower than the images.
–Lynch: “revealing the sickness . . .”
–Making films different than media.
–Emilio: You know who counts at 3.06 a.m. in a set. The west—FUCK OFF!!
–Bargen, LAST Name, German. Pronounced like “Bargain”
MSZ: What is this tentacled armpit for?
GDT: I just found it disturbing—the idea that in a Lovecraftian movie a character could raise their arm and you would see a bunch of tentacles moving. It’s an image I would like to use one day.
Below it is a sketch I did of the council of the elves on both sides of the throne, which ended up in Hellboy II in a different way. It says “The worst” because the prince says, “And for that I will call upon the help of all my people and they will answer. The good, the bad, and the worst.” He’s including “the worst” in his oath, which is the Golden Army. And I was playing with the idea that the train of the king’s robe was also the carpet leading up to the throne. But I didn’t use that either.
MSZ: Let’s talk about this portrait of the king [opposite].
GDT: I like the idea of a creature having ornamental elements that grow out of their body—of ornaments that are biological. You know, when you see a stick insect, it looks like a design. Or if you look at a flower or a vegetable, there is a symmetry and an elegance to the inside that is completely natural, organic. For example, when you slice a tomato, the veining is beautiful.
And this was especially important for the king of the underworld because he is related to trees and all the stuff they don’t have anymore. The idea is that the culture that was given the forests is now living in an abandoned, rusty train station, next to a boiler room. And yet, in their nature, they’re still wood. They’re still the evocation of nature. The elves in Hellboy II are really a displaced tribe. Mignola and I always talked about the prince being like Geronimo, and the elves having received the shittiest reservation thanks to their deal with mankind.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 30A
Bouderby.
GHOST
Liz’s invasion of H.B.’s space is reflected by an overwhelming increase in shoes and clothes that he’ll never wear.
–She confronts the public in order to save him.
King Balor.
–The clothes worn by royalty should be full of fabric, with several layers and shapes, too.
NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 32A
A gnome, seen behind the expo of H.
–Jane Eyre has arrived at Sharpe’s mansion without [?], calm. Blessings and congratulations and good fortune for your future.
–The Crimson Peak mansion “breathes” for the children.
–The Alchemical principle of “dissolve and coagulate” as part of the supreme creation can be applied to the processes of the soul/body.
–Wink’s fight is restricted by the space between the columns of the T.M. and I need to use the vertical space above. The problem is that the roof is made of solid stone too. I’ll ask Steve to build a machine that grinds the flesh and bone of the cats in the T.M./ without blood
–THE NUMINOUS
–Leather cowl.
Angel in Castle in Budapest
–King Balor’s visual “motif” should be a circle of Light in the past and in the present.
–By what mythology do we live by? I believe that TAO, HOMEOPATHY, ALCHEMY and JUNG are the 4 pillars.
“The Bone Crusher.”
Mignola left me this card on the tiny desk in the Hotel Sofitel in Budapest after we finished the storyboards for the Golden Army sequence for the film HBII April 8, 2007. This week Dona, Scott, Mike and David came to discuss the proposal and he took 2 weeks. 3 million dollars in key departments. Ydig was lost and we must kill my beloved Wink in the middle of the film instead of doing it at the end.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Page 21